Dr Pat Naldi

Lecturer MA Photography

Biography

Dr Pat Naldi is an artist and Lecturer in MA Photography at Central Saint Martins. She holds a PhD from Central Saint Martins, an MA in Fine Art from Newcastle Polytechnic and a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Maidstone College of Art & Design.

Her practice engages with the (art) practice of site-specificity as contexts for and as research, and is manifested through video, live events, installation, publications, photography, website projects, television and radio broadcasts, and writing. Naldi’s projects are exhibited internationally such as in Tate Britain; ZKM Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe; International Rome Film Festival; NGBK Berlin; Performance Space, Sydney; International Adelaide Festival; and Kate MacGarry, London. She has been awarded the ACE Helen Chadwick Senior Research Fellowship at the British School at Rome, and the Ruskin School of Art, and residencies at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Banff Center, Canada, and ACME London.

Naldi contributes regularly to conferences most recently at Stockholm University, Rennes 2 University and Frac Bretagne; University of Turku, Finland; Tallin and Tartu Universities, Estonia; Freie Universität, Berlin; and Tate Liverpool. Her writings include a chapter in the book Regenerating Culture and Society: Architecture, Art and Urban Style Within the Global Politics of City-Branding (Liverpool University Press/Tate Liverpool).

Research statement

My research focuses on the politics of power and its symbolic and active enactment – aesthetic, spatial, social, economic – in the city (particularly London) and the correlation of its economy and neoliberal desire of exclusivity and aspiration manifested by, and imbricated into, its urban fabric, socio‐spatial structure and skyline.

I am interested in the socio-political and ideological construction and operation of urban regeneration; the neoliberal coalescence of public/private space; and CCTV surveillance networks’ psychological method of control based on sociologically and politically motivated constructed anxieties of personal security and insecurity and its shaping of public space.

My PhD titled The view: a historicised and contemporary socio-political mediation (awarded 2015) investigated historical and contemporary views and their effects on citizens in order to question how these views operate visually, are used spatially, and perceived conceptually, as a means of developing critical understandings of the socio-political construction of views, and the ways in which they shape and position how we relate societally and to public space.

The thesis was configured as a series of conceptual, visual, and spatial vantage points that guided the reader’s viewpoint from the panoramic and global perspective of the view of the earth from space, to the particular and located, concluding in the here and now of the privatised view within the urban redevelopment of the King’s Cross estate.

Naldi, Pat (2015) Occupy UAL: the democratising of space. In: Spaces and tactics of politics: Transnational connections, neoliberalisation and the reshaping of civil society, 10-11 December 2015, University of Turku, Finland.